System monitoring is an important task in IT system management. Through system monitoring, a system administrator may understand the running state of the system and detect a problem in the system, so as to timely solve the problem and to further guarantee that the system operates normally and/or conforms to a requirement prescribed in the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
With the rapid development of cloud computing and service-oriented architecture technologies, a plurality of applications are integrated in an IT system to provide services to users. For example, a plurality of support applications may be employed at the backend of an online banking service. Such support applications include, but are not limited to, services for managing databases, account queries, services, transfers, and cross-bank settlements. To integrally monitor the online banking support services and to promptly locate the source of a failure upon its occurrence in an application, a corresponding monitor agent is deployed and activated for each application in the system. However, the deployment and running of a great number of monitoring proxies consumes a considerable amount of system resources. Moreover, the running of these monitoring proxies can even directly cause a malfunction of the IT system. Therefore, in determining the proper scope of deploying monitor proxies, a balance must be struck between the IT system performance and the resource consumption caused by deploying monitors.